DA is the champion of the poor – Zille

Politics / 9 March 2014, 10:22am

HENRIËTTE GELDENHUYS

CAPE TOWN, 2014/03/08, Otta Helene "Helen" Zille (/'z?l?/;[1] born 9 March 1951) is the Premier of the Western Cape,[2] a member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament,[3] leader of South Africa's opposition Democratic Alliance political party, and a former Mayor of Cape Town visited Blue Downs, Western Cape part of the Democratic Alliance (DA) election campaign. Next to Zille is Mmusi Maimane. Picture: Adrian de Kock

Cape Town - The DA was a champion of the poor, party leader and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille said at an election rally attended by about 4 000 people at Blue Downs Stadium on Saturday.

Zille told the crowd: “Every single thing we do focuses on the poorest people.”

She said the DA-controlled Western Cape spent 76 percent of its budgets on poor communities, delivering health, education, housing and social services to them.

Zille said more people in the province had access to running water, flush toilets and electricity “than anywhere else in the country”.

A recent Statistics SA report showed the Western Cape created 98 000 jobs in the last quarter of 2013, she said.

“Seventy percent of all new jobs in South Africa were created right here in the Western Cape and that’s in the last three months of last year. Imagine what would happen if we governed the whole of South Africa,” Zille said.

Western Cape MEC for Human Settlement Bonkinkosi Madikizela said the ANC would like people to believe the DA was a party for white people who would bring back apartheid.

“We see more and more non-white people in the DA because the DA is now a party for all South Africans,” said Madikizela. He also said five DA provincial leaders were people of colour.

“The DA is not a party for white people,” he said.

Madikizela and the DA’s Western Cape provincial leader, Ivan Meyer, used this week’s power outages to encourage people to vote DA on May 7.

Madikizela said: “I know there are power cuts at the moment. But on May 7, the biggest power cuts will be experienced because we’re going to cut the power of the ANC.”

Meyer said the ANC has “switched off the country’s power”, but by voting DA on May 7, “you can switch the power back on”.

The DA’s Gauteng premier candidate, Mmusi Maimane, said the Western Cape was a DA success story because the Western Cape government was putting the people of the province first, and not its politicians.

Maimane said Gauteng experienced two protests every day and “people are being robbed in broad daylight by having to pay for e-tolls”.

“I’m running for premier in Gauteng so that the change we see in the Western Cape can be the change we see in Gauteng,” he said.

DA supporters, almost all of them dressed in blue T-shirts emblazoned with the DA logo, waved party election posters in the air during the rally that started at 11am and ended at 1pm.

The politicians’ speeches, interspersed with footage of previous DA rallies and marches, were broadcast on three huge screens.

Singer Emo Adams also entertained the crowd between speeches.

DA supporters were brought in by bus from areas in Cape Town such as Mitchells Plain, Steenberg and Manenberg, but also from towns further afield such as Worcester, Wellington, Strand, Paarl and Franschhoek.